This Kidspiration color tiles activity will help students (grades 3-5) develop their spatial reasoning and problem-solving skills. Polyominoes are figures built of squares, or tiles. For a figure to be a polyomino, each square in the figure must share at least one edge with another square. In this activity, students will build dominoes (made of 2 tiles), trominoes (made of 3 tiles), tetrominoes (made of 4 tiles) and pentominoes (made of 5 tiles). The activity provides examples and non-examples for each type of polyomino and challenges students to find all of the different ways to put tiles together.

The activity template can be found by clicking on the yellow “Download File” button. A completed example (answer key) can also be downloaded and is listed below as an attachment.

Note: Students may need guidance in recognizing when some figures are merely transformations of something they have already built (flipped or rotated). By definition, these would count as the same polyomino.

This activity was created using Kidspiration 3, which must be installed to open the files. Download a 30-day free trial at www.inspiration.com/freetrial